The harder they fall: Nicola Gobbo, from gangland lawyer to family outcast

The name Gobbo opens doors in Melbourne. It doesn’t stand against a Baillieu or a Myer in this city where old money rules, but it carries a rare clout, never more so than in the legal world, where generations of the family have made their mark.

The weight of the name is part of what has left estranged friends unable to comprehend how Nicola Gobbo, the niece of former Victorian Governor and Supreme Court Judge Sir James Gobbo, found herself at the centre of the state's biggest legal scandal.

The reputation of the woman who was until Friday known as Informer 3838 is in tatters; the McMurdo royal commission is to focus on the police’s handling of her, and her life is apparently under threat.

Nicola Gobbo outside the Supreme Court in 2004 before applying for bail for her client Tony Mokbel.Credit:Vince Caligiuri

But through this, Gobbo refused to seek safety in anonymity. Just six months ago, she attended a Government House award ceremony where she was honoured for her work at a childcare centre in bayside Melbourne.

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Many in the legal fraternity remain baffled by the once-promising lawyer’s decision to betray some of the state’s most notorious criminals, in doing so abandoning the most fundamental conventions of her profession by furnishing police with privileged information.

One prominent Queen’s Counsel claims Gobbo has been the victim of "appalling manipulation" at the hands of senior police desperate to end the gangland war.

But most in the legal community blame Gobbo's vanity and hubris for her spectacular downfall.

Few lawyers are willing to speak on the record, as if any association with Gobbo could sully their own professional standing.

"You can't expect to play both sides of the street and not get burnt. No one's smart enough for that. Nicola loved the notoriety, the attention. She'd always be complaining about criminals or police or TV crews outside court, but she loved it all," said a former legal associate of Gobbo.

Another lawyer is more blunt, saying Gobbo was an "inveterate liar" who poisoned her family's good name.

The Gobbos emigrated from Italy in the 1930s and opened a restaurant not far from the Queen Victoria Market. They would build a legal dynasty. Sir James was made governor of Victoria, her cousin is a QC and her estranged sister, Catherine, a commercial lawyer.

Sir James and Lady Gobbo at home in Kew before moving to Government House in 2008.Credit:Cathryn Tremain

Born in 1972, Nicola was raised in a middle-class and unremarkable home, although reports suggest she was born with a silver spoon and an inflated sense of entitlement.

Her father Allan worked at the former Road Transport Authority office in Carlton, her mother Mary was a nurse. She moved among the city’s elite but her parents struggled to afford to keep her there.

Blue-eyed with a distinctive blonde mane, she attended Catholic girls school Genazzano in Kew (students and alumni are known as “Gen girls”), where she was known as bright and studious with lofty ambitions to become prime minister.

Both parents were diagnosed with lymphoma and her father died in her final year of high school. But through the hardship, Gobbo received a coveted offer to study law at Melbourne University.

Nicola Gobbo was drinking with Collingwood footballer Darren Millane on the night of his death.

There, she developed a love of partying and a taste for controversy. In 1991, she was with Collingwood footballer Darren Millane at the Tunnel nightclub on the night he drove home drunk and died. Gobbo would give evidence at the coronial inquest into Millane's death.

She was at the centre of another media storm in 1996, when as a member of the ALP, Gobbo publicly claimed a Liberal staffer had forged letters purporting to be from Jeff Kennett.

Her first brush with the law had come three years earlier when Gobbo and her Carlton housemates were busted with 1.4 kilograms of amphetamine worth $82,000 and 350 grams of cannabis.

Gobbo was then a third-year law student and editor of Melbourne University student magazine Farrago. She got off with a good behaviour bond and escaped a criminal conviction that would have cruelled her legal career before it began.

A former friend who helped her edit Farrago, said Gobbo’s co-accused took the heat for her.

“The Gobbo name. She was so proud of it - it meant something,” he said.

Ironically, members of the venerated clan have now disowned her.

Several family members publicly distanced themselves from the disgraced barrister on Friday.

Nicola Gobbo (left) outside court with barrister Con Heliotis, QC, after Tony Mokbel failed to show up for his trial in March 2006. Mokbel went on the run and was arrested in Greece the following year.Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

Her uncle Sir James Gobbo and aunt, Lady Gobbo, and her cousins Jeremy Gobbo, QC, Flavia Gobbo, Dr Olivia Gobbo, Danni Gobbo and James Gobbo, provided a brief statement to The Age.

“As a family, we have been disturbed by the revelations leading to the establishment of a royal commission into the management of informants by Victoria Police,” they said.

“No members of our immediate family have seen or spoken to Nicola in many years and have no knowledge of the matters to be investigated, or her actions.”

Most of the lawyers she worked cases with refused to comment, however, gangland lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson had no reservations in excoriating her one-time colleague and long-time legal rival. Both rolled with the same criminal set during the underworld war and some have falsely speculated that Garde-Wilson was Informer 3838.

Gangland lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson said Gobbo was "narcissistic".

She suspected Gobbo had crossed the line in 2006 when she was acting for a key underworld informer known as Witness B. Gobbo, who Garde-Wilson described as a narcissist, claimed she helped police to "turn" him.

Garde-Wilson said lawyers could be informers, but never on their own clients.

"This wasn't just information - this was proper police undercover work. She was being tasked. She was acting as a police officer," Garde-Wilson said.

Garde-Wilson has lodged an appeal against the conviction of former-Gobbo client Rob Karam, jailed for large-scale trafficking after a then world-record seizure of ecstasy pills was found in tomato tins on Melbourne’s docks.

Gangland getaway driver Faruk Orman in 2007.Credit:Craig Abraham

She said the gravity of Gobbo’s behaviour was almost unimaginable.

"People should be going to jail. That's how big it is. This is the grossest scale of the perversion of the course of justice that ever existed. This is planned, organised and intentional at the highest level."

Galbally Rolfe solicitor Ruth Parker is representing Faruk Orman, the gangland getaway driver jailed over the murder of Victor Peirce. She says Gobbo informed on Orman while she was defending him against murder charges.

“She is persona non grata to the legal profession,” Parker said.

“You can imagine the disgust senior members of counsel must feel that those hard-fought cases were compromised by their own colleague.”

One prominent lawyer Gobbo worked for remembers joking about getting his chambers swept for listening devices; it was like police knew their defence strategy before they had even settled on one.

“She fooled me,” he said.

Others recall her grilling clients for information.

“There’s a line where lawyers get a choice about whether they cross it or not. A line that if you cross it, you can’t cross back. Nicola crossed it,” the lawyer said.

Gobbo’s ascension was rapid in the ‘work hard, play hard’ world of criminal law.

Mick Gatto and Nicola Gobbo at the funeral of Labor stalwart Stephen Drazetic in 2008.Credit:Angela Wylie

Meanwhile, the decadent lifestyle of her university days rolled on when she was away from the courtroom. She loved to party, often with her underworld clients and regularly to excess.

“Nic was always the loudest person in the room. Especially when she was drunk. Wild, loud, aggressive even. She needed to be the centre of attention,” another lawyer said.

By 2003, at age 30, Gobbo was the go-to lawyer for winning bail for her clients. She earned the nickname the ‘million-dollar legal eagle’ after securing the release of underworld figures Tony Mokbel and Lewis Moran in exchange for a $1 million bail.

Nicola Gobbo (right) with Tony Mokbel in 2002 after he was released on bail.Credit:Vince Caligiuri

“This was the gangland war. This was Mokbel, this was Carl [Williams] and there she was, right at the f---ing heart of it,” a former friend said.

But she knew she was swimming with sharks. In 2004, she claimed in a newspaper interview that she was always looking over her shoulder and noting the number plates of cars parked outside her Port Melbourne home. (Her BMW would be torched in a South Melbourne street in 2008.)

Nicola Gobbo the morning after her BMW was torched, in April 2008.Credit:Justin McManus

In an interview with the Herald Sun the same year - and around the time she was being courted by Purana taskforce detectives eager to end the gangland war - Gobbo claimed to have a deep mistrust of police.

"I have my concerns about members of the police force. I am paranoid about who is listening to me all the time," she said.

Gobbo claimed she was planning to move to south-east Asia to open a smoothie bar in a bid to get away from it all.

But throughout her turbulent career, Gobbo was prone to rash decisions.

Less than a year later, she agreed to become registered police informer 3838. By the time it all went belly-up, she believes she was responsible for the arrest of 386 people and the seizure of $60 million in assets from the proceeds of crime.

In evidence she would give in one of a myriad of secret hearings in 2017, Gobbo claimed she only offered to work for the police because she had reached breaking point.

She remembered walking to court hoping she would be hit by a tram so she could escape the problems confronting her.

Gobbo said she wanted to rid herself of Mokbel, who she claimed had pressured her to force one of his low-level pill press operators to “keep his mouth shut and plead guilty”.

The pact between Gobbo and police would unravel spectacularly with the murder of another police informer, Terence Hodson, and his wife Christine in Kew in May 2004.

Terence and Christine Hodson were executed at their Kew home.

A police file revealing Terence had turned informer was being passed around the underworld.

The prevailing theory behind the double murder was Carl Williams had acted as a broker between hitman Rodney Collins and drug squad detective Paul Dale, who wanted a drug burglary case in which Hodson was an informer to disappear.

Gobbo’s name also arose in the investigation.

She was caught on phone taps organising a meeting with Williams in the lead-up to the hit, and she told police in early 2009 that she had passed on a message for him to contact Dale.

“I didn’t know why Paul wanted to meet Carl and it wasn’t my business to ask,” she said in her statement.

By then, Williams had been convicted of three underworld murders and turned police informer in prison. But detectives needed corroboration to link Dale to the Hodson murders, so Gobbo met him wearing a wire.

Carl Williams is arrested at Port Melbourne in 2003.Credit:Angela Wylie

Gobbo’s decision to turn prosecution witness in the case against Dale - which fell apart after Williams was murdered in prison - set off a chain of events.

It meant she would have to give evidence in court, and the criminal world soon found out she had worn a wire. She was branded, in underworld parlance, a "dog".

Police were by then shuffling Gobbo, who was receiving death threats, between hotel rooms. She also faced major health problems, suffering a stroke in July 2004, and undergoing heart surgery. She later said she was upset that none of her underworld mates had bothered to visit her in hospital.

Former drug squad detective Paul Dale.Credit:Craig Abraham

In 2010, Gobbo issued proceedings in the Supreme Court against the state of Victoria, Chief Commissioner Simon Overland and his predecessor, Christine Nixon.

In her statement of claim, she alleged she was induced by police to make a statement against Dale and that her security and safety as a witness had not been properly managed.

Victoria Police denied any agreement existed between it and Gobbo, but agreed to pay her almost $3 million in September 2012.

Gobbo’s writ alleges the force gave her a $1000 a week allowance and picked up the bill on everything from flights, to concert tickets to see Pink and a Victoria Racing Club membership.

"I didn't appreciate that at the time I made the decision to become a witness for Victoria Police I had been put in a situation which every assurance given to me was a lie," she said.

By then, her relationship with police had become toxic. She also had more than herself to worry about: she was a mother to two children - one whose father is believed to be a convicted drug dealer and former client.

Many will question why Gobbo didn't bundle up her children and leave town when the scandal first erupted in 2014.

Despite blanket suppression orders on her identity, her role as Informer 3838 was one of Melbourne's worst-kept secrets, particularly in the underworld.

In a 2015 letter to police, Gobbo wrote: “I am not prepared to entrust everything personal to me and my children … to the very organisation that promised and assured me that my assistance over a number of years would remain confidential, yet failed so appallingly.”

Barrister Nicola Gobbo pictured on holiday at the Hard Rock Hotel in Kuta in Bali with an unidentified man from US Navy warship docked in Bali

Police counter that she was near-impossible to manage or protect. Despite warnings about her safety, Gobbo refused to shed her blue-blood name. She maintained social media accounts under ‘Nicki Gobbo’ and continued to post photographs of her kids on her private Instagram page to promote enrolments at a bayside childcare centre.

She refused to dye her distinctive hair and continued to perform volunteer work, shop at the local Coles, trade real estate, and make regular trips to Bali.

In September, she attended Government House to receive a Premier’s Volunteer Champions Award for her work at the childcare centre. Her nomination said the centre was "thriving thanks to Nicki’s skilled and selfless leadership."

Nicola Gobbo receives the Premier's Volunteer Champions leadership award in September last year.

In December, the High Court warned Gobbo that the state could seize her young children if she continued to refuse offers of police assistance.

Former colleagues remain sceptical about evidence she might provide to the royal commission.

"Who’d believe her now? I'd back whatever she does will be in her own best interests," said a retired barrister.

Her establishment relatives are ashamed of the association and want nothing to do with her.

The Gobbo name once opened so many doors in Melbourne. For at least one Gobbo, those doors are firmly shut.